Briatore's and Symonds' Stories Don't Match Up in Crash-Gate

Although Renault have constantly denied all fixing allegations regarding last year's Singapore Grand Prix, the French manufacturer has every right to feel worried about their appearance before the World Motor Sport Council on September 21st. As it emerged in recent media reports, it seems the FIA has plenty of documentation and evidence to sustain their charges in the famous crash-gate.

According to British magazine Autosport, it seems former Renault driver Nelsinho Piquet and his father were the men who triggered the whole scandal. On the very day the Brazilian driver spent his last day in the R29 cockpit – July 26th – Piquet Sr. called Max Mosley and shared some valuable information regarding the last year's night race.

Some 4 days later, Piquet Jr. visited the WMSC headquarters in Paris to share his own view on what happened in Singapore.

According to the aforementioned source, Piquet revealed he had a meeting with team boss Flavio Briatore and head of engineering Pat Symonds hours before the Sunday race to discuss strategy. It was then when he was instructed to deliberately crash out of the race between laps 13 and 14, right before Fernando Alonso's first pit stop.

Also, the place for the crash was carefully selected so that it would trigger the deployment of the safety car, meaning no cranes were supposed to be in the vicinity to lift the car away in due time.

Supporting those accusations seems to be his R28's telemetry that day, which clearly shows Piquet accelerated under low-grip conditions, something that not even a non-experienced driver would do in normal circumstances.

Also, Piquet argued that he was afraid of losing his seat with Renault if he didn't agree with the plan, especially since his contract with the Enstone based team was to expire at the end of 2008.

When questioned about the pre-race discussion, Briatore's and Symonds' did not quite match up. The fishy part about it is that, while the Italian insisted the topic of fixing the race never came up during that meeting, Symonds admits it. Only he argues it was Piquet's idea to begin with.

“It's true, during the Sunday meeting with Piquet the issue of deliberately causing a SC deployment came up, but it was proposed by Piquet himself. It was just a conversation,” said Symonds, according to the autosport report.

We're not exactly sure why would Piquet Jr., in his very rookie year in Formula One, have the guts to come up with such an idea in front of his team principals, but we're sure expecting the WMSC meeting for further details to emerge on the matter.